Abderrahmane Sissako’s African Worlds: Waiting for Happiness

Abderrahmane Sissako’s African Worlds film series is co-presented by the UW African Studies Program, Black Cinema Collective, Henry Art Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

Before immigrating to the West, Abdallah travels to the coastal city of Nouadhibou, Mauritania, to visit his mother. Although he grew up there, Abdallah feels anything but at home in his old neighborhood: He can no longer speak the local dialect, and he wears western clothes that immediately cast him as an outsider. But, as Abdallah spends time with a young boy and an elderly electrician and strikes up relationships with others in Nouadhibou, he can't help but feel a sense of loss for the life he's abandoning.

ABOUT SISSAKO Abderrahmane Sissako, born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, trained in the Soviet Union, France, and elsewhere, is the Oscar- and Palme d’Or-nominated director and writer or co-writer of 4 award-winning feature films: Life on Earth, 1999; Waiting for Happiness, 2002; Bamako, 2006; and Timbuktu, 2014. He recently staged his first opera, Le Vol du Boli, with music from Damon Albarn (Gorillaz, Blur). He has also made numerous shorts and served as producer on the films of promising, young West African filmmakers.